this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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How does the 'first level is free, pay if you want the rest' model hold up today? I recall when the original Doom came out. Everything, including network play (maybe not the BFG) was available to try. We were all playing pvp on the university LAN on the free version.
It died because to make games fit on discs/media they need to be compact making it very hard to ship a limited version without shipping all content. Back in the days generally all the "try before you buy" games shipped the full content leading to cracks that simply unlocked it.
Today a company that doesn't have a hard-on for DRM could of course run with the model and just chalk up piracy to advertisment and people that wouldn't buy the game anyway. Kinda like any company selling on GOG.
Of course those are the minority, most companies want / need DRM in some form and the model just works against it. It might be possible to make it work with something like Denuvo but I doubt anyone would be happy about that.
Demos are wide spread these days. There's a ton of them for a wide range of games available on steam and the switch store. They've made a big comeback the past few years.
Helped by Steam having regular demo centered events. Which are awesome!
Heck, I just played the demo for Octopath Traveler 2, but this was a self-published demo by the studio. It was enough for me to know this game wasn't for me but I'm thankful I didn't have to buy it and refund it as a result.
Same. But I also played the triangle strategy demo and definitely want to get that eventually, which I wasn't going to do because of Octopath.
Long live the demo